Et moi, c'est demain, le jour de ma mort - le cinq avril - - Est-ce qu'ils vont me transporter à Graz? Ha ha ! c'est les vers de terre, à Graz, qui vont être contents!

Si ça continue, je vais finir par tellement me dégoûter moi-même que je me tuerai de honte! - La vieille là-bas - pourquoi est-ce qu'elle peut bien encore prier?... Tiens, ça serait une idée, d'aller la trouver et lui dire : priez aussi pour moi... j'ai pas vraiment appris comment on fait... Ah! Il me semble que ça rend idiot de mourir!

Ah, voilà les journaux... déjà ceux d'aujourd'hui?... Est-ce qu'ils disent déjà quelque chose?... Mais quoi? - C'est à croire que je veux vérifier si on annonce déjà que je me suis tué! Ha ha!

Jules leva le doigt.
"Et pourquoi Rufus l'aurait-il fait? demanda-t-il. Il lui aurait été plus simple d'écrire directement sur le mur.
- Pas si simple que ça! répondit le maître. As-tu déjà essayé d'écrire dans l'obscurité?"
Jules ne sut que répondre.
"Ah! tu vois? fit Xantippe très satisfait. Toi, tu n'es même pas capable d'écrire correctement en plein jour!"

Just back from a long train journey, I took the opportunity to read Michael Kohlhaas in German. I can't imagine this text in English; it somehow seems simultaneously modern, and of the time in which the story is set. The actual language hardly intrudes at all, but there are particular words or phrases whose recurrence or juxtaposition hints at darker, hidden meaning; horrible things are described with equanimity, but there is always just a hint of deeper feeling beneath the surface. The foreword coins the phrase "anti-rhetoric"- a deliberate toning down of the descriptive passages, in order to focus attention on single moments, character's reactions, or a gesture.

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

"A man once made it a reproach that I should be so happy, and told me everybody has crosses, and that we live in a vale of woe. I mentioned moles as my principal cross, and pointed to the huge black mounds with which they had decorated the tennis-court, but I could not agree to the vale of woe, and could not be shaken in my belief that the world is a dear and lovely place, with everything in it to make us happy so long as we walk humbly and diet ourselves. He pointed out that sorrow and sickness were sure to come, and seemed quite angry with me when I suggested that they too could be borne perhaps with cheerfulness. 'And have not even such things their sunny side?' I exclaimed. 'When I am steeped to the lips in diseases and doctors, I shall at least have something to talk about that interests my women friends, and need not sit as I do now wondering what I shall say next and wishing they would go.' He replied that all around me lay misery, sin, and suffering, and that every person not absolutely blinded by selfishness must be aware of it and must realise the seriousness and tragedy of existence. I asked him whether my being miserable and discontented would help any one or make him less wretched; and he said that we all had to take up our burdens. I assured him I would not shrink from mine, though I felt secretly ashamed of it when I remembered that it was only moles, and he went away with a grave face and a shaking head, back to his wife and his eleven children. I heard soon afterwards that a twelfth baby had been born and his wife had died, and in dying had turned her face with a quite unaccountable impatience away from him and to the wall; and the rumour of his piety reached even into my garden, and how he had said, as he closed her eyes, 'It is the Will of God.' He was a missionary."

Quintessential Elizabeth.  And yet, her own cross amounted to vastly more than mole hills, too, in fact.

"All those maxims about judging others by yourself, and putting yourself in another person's place, are not, I am afraid, reliable. I had them dinned into me constantly as a child, and I was constantly trying to obey them, and constantly was astonished at the unexpected results I arrived at; and now I know that it is a proof of artlessness to suppose that other people will think and feel and hope and enjoy what you do and in the same way that you do."

True. But then, you also had the courage to defy convention, Elizabeth ...

And I still think at least when it comes to cruelty vs. common decency, there is something to be said in favor of "don't do to others what you don't want to have done to yourself."